“The data center industry is the largest consumer of clean energy out there,” shared Chris Pennington. “Some of the really innovative new solutions that are making renewable energy more available to companies of all sizes and scales are in fact being driven by the conversations data center operators are having with their local providers or retail energy providers.”

“There are numerous instances and examples where data centers have gone into a market or expanded in a market and paired that growth with additional renewable capacity — either directly from a competitive market, from private developers, or from utilities supply,” added Aaron Binkley.

“With data centers, there’s a lot of power and cooling infrastructure that goes into these buildings. The initial focus is on the steel and concrete in the core and shell of the building — and then there’s a massive amount of electrical infrastructure and cooling infrastructure that goes in as you fit out the suites for individual customers to tenant the building,” said Binkley. “That equipment and that infrastructure also has a significant carbon footprint. [What sometimes is overlooked] is everything you do to fit out that data center.”

“Electrical infrastructure and building materials that go into our sites pose a big opportunity to engage our suppliers, and [at Equinix] we’ve hired a supply chain diversity and sustainability leader to really start those conversations,” noted Jennifer Ruch.

“The investment community is rapidly scaling up their ESG efforts and continuing to grow their interest, but in many ways we’re still educating them on what the material issues are for data centers,” said Ruch. “Answering questions like: How do you buy renewable energy? Are we actually delivering electrons of green energy directly to the site, or how does the virtual power purchase agreement work? At the same time we’re also educating our equity research analysts and other key stakeholders on what we’re doing and how we as an industry are promoting sustainability leadership.”

“Our tenants are absolutely asking us questions about the energy efficiency of our facilities, the water consumption of our facilities, and the total carbon footprint per megawatt of our facilities,” Pennington shared, adding a perspective on how tenants are involved in the equation. “We are a big piece of their energy footprint and their energy supply chain, so absolutely these are qualifying questions for when they are selecting a co-location data center provider.”